Mission Endure 69: Growing a Winter Garden

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Now that our Winter Lettuce Garden has been growing for a little over 3 months I think it is time to do an overview and an update on how the garden has fared so far. We have learned a few things along the way that might help us the future and hopefully it will inspire you to decide to grow and indoor garden this winter. We actually may never grow lettuce outside again. It works that well indoors.

Every winter we get tired of buying lettuce at the market that has no flavor and no color other than a little shade of green to it. We have been buying Romaine lettuce from Sam’s Club for several years, and in the winter it either comes from Yuma, Arizona, or inland southern California. I grew up in southern California and both of those places are great places. But they are a long ways from the snowy winter prairie of Illinois. The point is that the lettuce gets picked, washed, and packaged, and arrives in our stores in the Midwest a week or two later. We open up the bag and the lettuce needs to be washed again, and then we spin it in a salad spinner to get most of the water off of it, and then we package it in gallon sized ziplock bags to keep in the fridge. A week or two later (a month after it was picked) the lettuce is either all eaten or needs to be thrown away because it has wilted and has become inedible. We grew tired of this process over and over all winter long and were looking for a new way to get fresh lettuce at home that tastes wonderful and is tasty and crisp every time we eat it. We were also looking for a process where we are more involved in the production of our own food. That way we know the chemicals that go into it and the hands that touch it from planting to eating.

We have tried growing our own lettuce, tomatoes, beans, and peppers indoors before. It didn’t turn out well for us. We always got long stems without much growth as far as leaves or fruit go. This year we decided to order new grow lights and focus on getting more light to the plants. The results have been amazing.

Below is a photo I took of out harvest on December 15. We have been harvesting 1 or 2 gallon ziplock bags full of lettuce 2 times per week for the last 2 months. With just 2 of us it is more than enough lettuce to keep us happily eating salads and sandwiches several times per week. It doesn’t look like much because we fit a lot of lettuce in the bag, and then flatten the air out and roll it up to store it as compactly as possible in our fridge. Kind of like Marie Kondo style. We have so much lettuce in the fridge that we have to store it this way.

In the photo above we have a mixture of the 4 types of lettuce we are growing. Parris Island Cos is a dark green, crispy and crunchy romaine style of lettuce. Flashy Butter Gem is a green and purple variegated (you can see some of the purple showing through the ziplock bag above) bib style of lettuce that is very flavorful and has tender leaves. May Queen Butterhead and Black Seeded Simpson are both all green and also have very tender leaves. Harvesting them all together is a recipe for a wonderful lettuce mix. We use a cut-and-come-again style of harvesting where we only prune out the largest and most mature leaves, leaving the others behind to continue growing and producing for future harvests.

Here is the system we set up to start gardening. We started with a 5-Tier shelf that is sturdy enough to hold over 300 pounds of plants. Plants themselves are not very heavy, but when you water them they will be substantially heavier. Here is what I would start with. I would use a Chrome YSSOA 5-Tier heavy Duty Storage Shelving Unit with shelves that measure 35” across and 18” deep and are adjustable. We were lucky. We were in the middle of downsizing our server room at work and we had a couple of 70” wide wire shelves that we no longer needed. They are enormous, and shelves like that are super expensive, so I would not have used them if they hadn’t been free to us. The 35” one at the link above is all you should need. it runs a little under $100 on Amazon.

The lights we used are Barina 48” LED Grow Lights. A package of 6 lights ran us about $100. We have tried growing lettuce and tomatoes with other grow lights, and none of them worked well at all until we started using the Barina ones. They have worked better than I ever could have wished for. 6 of the Barina lights will work with 3 each on two large grow shelves. That is how I have our system set up, as you can see in the below photo.

One of the reasons we hadn’t used he Barina lights before is because we were looking to use the least expensive lights we could find to do the work. The shelving and the grow lights are the most expensive part of the growing system. But, they will pay for themselves over the long-run if you keep growing lettuce. We had some growing trays from starting seedlings in previous years, so we didn’t need to purchase them. And we recycled some plastic 6 inch Nursery Pots to plant our lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, basil, and cilantro in. Other than the shelving and the lights it is very inexpensive to get started. Here are some photos of the results of what we have grown. I took these on December 15, right before we harvested our lettuce.

The first photo is our oldest Parris Island Cos, which we planted on October 1, and we are no longer harvesting and letting go to seed to see if we can harvest the seed and have free seed for the next round of planting. It is not a very flattering photo, but it shows how much the lettuce has grown since the beginning of October.

The next photo is a grow tray full of mixed plantings of lettuce. All 4 types that I have listed above are growing here. It looks like one of the May Queen Butterheads is starting to bolt and go to seed, so we may move it to the floor like the oldest Parris Island Cos. These lettuces were all planted on November 1

The nest photos is our growing tray of mixed lettuce and cilantro planted on November 15, 1 month ago. They are growing very fast and have almost caught up to the plants that are 2 weeks older.

Lastly, I wanted to show you how well the Tomatoes and Peppers are doing that we planted on November 1. I will probably need to transplant the 4 tomatoes into individual pots to keep them growing.

We are really excited at how well the indoor garden is doing this winter. Like I said earlier, we many never plant lettuce outside again. We’ll see how the tomatoes and peppers do indoors and maybe we will make the same decision with them. It has been a lot of fun to see how well this system works.